Late Night Conversation between Hitch and Sullivan

Late Night conversation between the late Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. Complete thread can be seen here. Sully and Hitch After Dark

Andrew Sullivan writes "A while back – by which I mean several years ago now – I thought it would be a cool idea to do some post-prandial chats with some of my favorite people. It occurred to me that the best conversations I ever heard in Washington never happened on television or radio. They were always way off the record. But they might occur, I suspected, if we just attached microphones to ourselves, had a bottle of wine or two and just riffed. And who else to start with but Hitch"

Some of the excerpts:

A: I think that what [Oakeshott] would say, and what I would say, is that what’s sinister is the deployment of dogma as certainty. If one takes Lessing and Oakeshott’s view of Christianity, which is ultimately that God is unknowable -

H: Then don’t pretend to know.

A: Then we cannot know. Or, what we can know, we will hold with a certain humility and provisionality. I mean, one can know, for example, that the Gospels exist and that they represented a human being whose life can be either honored or dishonored.

H: But the further implication of this is that if you admit or concede or even claim that it’s unknowable, then the first group to be eliminated from the argument are those who claim to know.

A: Yes.

H: Because they must be wrong.

A: Yes.

H: Well, that lets off quite a lot of people at the first floor of the argument, long before the elevator has started moving upwards, or downwards. Those who say they know, and can say they know it well enough, what God wants you to eat or whom he wants you to sleep with – they must be wrong.

A: That is proof itself that they are wrong.

H: Yes. As well as being impossibly arrogant, coming in the disguise of modesty, humility, simplicity. Ah, I’m just a humble person doing God’s work. No, excuse me, you must be either humble or doing God’s work. You can’t know what God’s work would be, don’t try your modesty on me. And once one’s made that elimination, then everything else becomes more or less simple. My problem only begins there.